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Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe

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Why You Shouldn’t Be Outraged By Elephant Hunting

When Cecil, the magnificent, 13-year old, black-mane lion was killed by an American dentist on an illegal trophy bow hunt last year, the world responded with shock and horror. As details emerged, a soft-spoken yet fiercely passionate Zimbabwean was repeatedly seen and quoted in the media, reporting directly from the field. That was photographer Brent Stapelkamp, 38, the last person to fit Cecil with a GPS satellite collar and to photograph him, just a month before he was killed. For the last decade, Stapelkamp had been quietly following and researching lions in Zimbabwe’s largest game reserve, Hwange National Park, for Oxford University’s Hwange Lion Research Project. “I had the dream job,” he says. Cecil’s death hurtled Stapelkamp into the spotlight, educating a largely unknowing public about the secret life of trophy hunting. A year later, he’s still speaking out on behalf of African wild lions, whose numbers have suffered catastrophic declines. “We had 1.2 million wild lions in the 1800s,” said Stapelkamp. “Now there are 20,000.” In addition to unsustainable trophy hunting, the decimation of Africa’s top predator is precipitated by the illegal bushmeat trade, loss of habitat and prey, and conflict with local people, which is the largest direct cause of lion deaths in Africa today, according to Stapelkamp. The following is a collection of images Stapelkamp shot of Cecil, his pride, and neighboring wildlife in Hwange from 2010 to 2015. Photo: This is one of my favorite photos of Cecil, taken in late May 2015, on the last morning that I saw him. I had bumped into Cecil and another lion, Jericho, while racing across the park to collar another lion. I call it “Cecil taking the air” because of his regal posture. The grasses here turn golden in May, the start of our winter season.

The Last Days of Cecil the Lion

Once a year Johannesburg-based Wilderness Safaris organizes its Tour de Tuli, a 300-kilometer (186-mile), four-day MTB ride through the Tuli Block of southern Africa, connecting Botswana, Zimbabwe and South Africa. Unlike other multi-stage tours through Africa—or elsewhere around the world—this one is supported by three separate governments, with makeshift border crossings along riverbanks (you’ll need to keep your Ziploc-ed passport tucked inside your jersey, alongside your energy chews). Capped at 350 riders, plus 150 support staff, the tour fills up fast once it opens for registration each year in late November. Last August, I joined a team led by Russel Friedman, one of Wilderness Safaris’s founding partners and chairman of Children in the Wilderness, the educational program Wilderness operates in the communities outside its camps in seven southern African countries. The ride is its chief fundraiser. The course was mostly ancient elephant trails, single tracks across sprawls of loose stones, Moab-style steep cliffs and ridges, forests of swollen baobabs, fever trees and thorny bush—plus lots of hills and sand, and hills of sand—through a pristine 3,000-square-mile tract that’s normally inaccessible to the public. Friedman broke his back mountain-biking last year, and yet at 65 he still rode me into the dust—of which there was plenty. It was the hardest multi-stage ride I’ve ever been on, but when you’re with some 300-plus South Africans (plus cyclists from another dozen countries), one thing’s for sure: at the end of the day you don’t drink alone. Photo: There are lots of ways to go on safari in Africa. By mountain bike is one of them. Fortunately, the riders, not the predators, were the only ones in “attack position.”

5 Nights, 4 Days, 3 Countries, 1 Mountain Bike

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